SummEr/FAll 2011 - Nazareth College

Brilla-Fitzpatrick started experimenting with materials unfamiliar to
her, such as charcoal, because she wanted to teach with them.
“You say you’re an artist and people say, ‘Oh, what do you work in?’
I like to say, ‘My bathrobe,’” she says with a big laugh. “The medium
an artist works in isn’t what they do. It’s just the vehicle that best accommodates
their vision.”
The classroom is also a place where she can scrutinize complications
that arise in her own paintings—she designs lessons around
them. “It used to be that if I had to solve a problem, I would think
back to what my professors told me. Now I hear my own voice. I can
switch from being a painter to a teacher and look at my images more
objectively.”
“She shows us that she can screw up, too—that she’s just as human
as we are and that we shouldn’t be afraid to ask questions,” says art
education major Elizabeth Bondor ’14. “It’s easier to learn in an
environment like that.”
Students are quick to list the quirky qualities that make Brilla-Fitzpatrick
as endearing as her teaching style. For instance, instead of a
group photo at the end of each semester, she remembers each student
by taping strands of their hair on a white sheet of paper displayed
among other decorations on her office wall. Names are written beside
the cuttings. With an artist’s eye, she draws a visitor’s attention to the
various textures and colors, including light blue and orange.
Brilla-Fitzpatrick works out of a studio in her apartment in the
village of Pittsford. Her style blends a personal study of linear perspective—the
idea that parallel lines meet at vanishing points and shapes
get smaller with increasing distance from the eye—and the basics of
abstract expressionism she was taught while growing up in the ’60s.
Though her art pieces are compact, they take at least three months to
create, and that’s only if she works on them nearly six hours a day.
“One of the reasons my paintings are so small,” she reveals, “is that
I want to express the preciousness of art, how reverent I feel toward
the making of art.”
Jessica Pike ’14, a photography student in one of Brilla-Fitzpatrick’s
drawing classes, appreciates her professor’s concern for creative
integrity. “For our critiques, she’ll say, ‘What was going on in your
head?’ You have to try to explain not necessarily the technique you
used, but why you drew what you drew. It gives everything a much
deeper meaning.”
“I don’t focus so much on how real you can make something look,”
responds Brilla-Fitzpatrick. “It’s about what information is necessary
to be able to talk about the essence of what a thing does, not what it
is. You want to be able to recognize the integral truth.
“Ultimately, the process of making art becomes a metaphor for how
one lives their life.”
Check out Nazareth’s art department at naz.edu/art.
Butterflies and Ballerinas, by Maureen Brilla-Fitzpatrick
“The medium an artist works in
isn’t what they do. It’s just the vehicle
that best accommodates their vision.”
— MAUREEN Brilla-Fitzpatrick
Robin L. Flanigan is a freelance writer in Rochester, New York.
www.naz.edu CONNECTIONS | Summer/Fall 2011 39